Lincoln Center Theater Review

Awake and Sing! Spring 2006, Issue 42

Chronology Clifford Odets The Winter of Our Discontent: 1933 Harold Clurman 1929 Cheryl Crawford It was Better That Way: An Interview with Clifford Odets Arthur Wagner 1935 Alfred Kazin Unfreezing Words Lore Segal Waiting for Odets John Lahr A Different Kind of Success: A Conversation with Ellen Adler Taking the Heat Ellen Schiff Slouching Toward Universality Neal Gabler America's Fervent Playwright Marian Seldes Struggling with Integrity: An Interview with Walt Odets Jon Robin Baitz 1961 Cheryl Crawford Go On, Shout! Elia Kazan

Odets pulled us out of self-pity. Everything so long choked up in twenty thousand damp hallways and on all those rumpled summer sheets, everything still smelling of the cold shadowed sand littered with banana peels under the boardwalk at Coney Island, everything that went back to the gaveled roofs over the tenements, the fire escapes in the torrid nights, the food, the food, the pickle stands in the shadow of the subway and the screams of protest-I never in my life even had a birthday party. Every time I went and cried in the toilet when my birthday came-was now out in the open, at last, and we laughed.... How I admired Odets! How grateful I was to Odets!... Sitting in the Belasco, watching my mother and father and uncles and aunts occupying the stage in Awake and Sing! by as much right as if they were Hamlet and Lear, I understood at last. It was all one, as I had always known. Art and truth and hope could yet come together-if a real writer was their meeting place. -Alfred Kazin

Excerpt from Starting Out in the Thirties, © 1962 by Alfred Kazin, permission of The Wylie Agency.
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